Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov and The Moscow Film School

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When film first started gaining popularity, it want’s as obvious that be connecting two different images, we would assume their relation. Film simply document events that occurred, it wasn’t until the enterprising pioneers of early cinema took hold that they began to manipulate their audience into following a story their way and feeling it in those exact steps. Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov a Soviet filmmaker and film theorist in the 1920s who taught at and helped establish the world’s first film school, the Moscow Film School. He was one of the very first film theorists and one the great pioneers of early editing regarded amongst worldwide filmmaker and he is famous for what became known as Soviet Montage.

From Kuleshov perspective, the essences of the cinema was editing was the act of placing two things near each other that contrasted each other. To show this principle, he created what we have come to know as today as the Kuleshov Experiment. There is a video of the Kuleshov experiment that is still currently functioning on the media-sharing site YouTube: The experimental video shows a shots of an actor Ivan Mozhukhin, intercut with various meaningful things a bowl of soup, a dead child inside a casket, a woman lying down. So it there was three shots was of an expressionless man looking at the camera, and juxtaposed that with three things mentioned (soup, child, and women). The actor doesn’t see them, they are mostly likely not connected, and quite frankly they could have been shot in separate places for all we know. It is the audience that voluntarily makes the connection, they assume they are directly related in some way in their head whilst consciously watching, the audience tries to create meaning by combining the two imag...

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